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Although Michelangelo Antonioni's feature films were almost all entirely against everything the neo-realist movement purported to be (Il Grido (1957) being the exception), his early documentaries always possessed hints of the movement. His documentaries were always about the working class, from the street cleaners of N.U. (1948) to the river workers in his first documentary, Gente del Po (1943). In the way he stuck unabashedly with the working class he resembled his apprentice, Roberto Rossellini, for which Antonioni would write Un Pilota Ritorna in 1942. Antonioni would later be quoted as saying he was always decidedly against the political fixations and aesthetic indifference of the movement, but said ignoring the movement was an impossibility when trying to make films in post-war Italy.

With Rossellini planted firmly in cheek, Antonioni would make twelve documentaries about various components of the working class, before jumping into the upper class venues of his feature films starting with Cronaca di un Amore in 1950. Although his attention to beautiful location filming has always been a component of his work, Sette Canne un Vestito (1949) is probably the most accomplished of all his documentaries. Chronicling the harvesting and eventual manufacture of rayon, a new post-war synthetic fabric, Antonioni's cameras roll in two locations that would be very influential on his feature film career – the Po Valley and Torviscosa's industrial plants.

The trees along the Po river would end up serving as a significant backdrop for Aldo's melancholic journey in Il Grido and are shot with a similarly caged-in aesthetic. The workers in Sette Canne seem like prisoners behind the wall of Po river trees. More interesting though, is Antonioni's fascination with the machinery and pollution inherent in the industrial manufacture of products. Several shots predict Il Deserto Rosso (1964), from the symmetric and distant shots of buildings with all their crisscrossing deco to his unwavering obsession with the properties of smoke. Like in Il Deserto Rosso, a worker is engulfed entirely by a massive dispelling of smoke, demonstrating his insignificance and vulnerability to the greater industrial, capitalist whole. A low angle shot of a smoke stack suggests the masculine power inherent in Italy's fascist renaissance.

Sette Canne un Vestito is too beautiful to be deemed neo-realist – every shot seems handpicked and fabricated, although Antonioni claims he would never direct his working class subjects. Of all his work though, this is probably the most influenced by the neo-realist movement, capped off with a subversive dig at fascism. After the film spends all its time with the working class in their struggle to get these fabrics manufactured, Antonioni ends off at a bourgeois fashion show. He cuts together several shots of glamorous women coming down the runway in the very materials the proletariat worked so hard to produce. It is a total slighting of all their hard work, and Antonioni makes sure to make apparent the greedy disconnect of the upper class, and how much of the proletariat's work is abused by the few in power. Antonioni would try to shy away from politics in his films, but Sette Canne is probably the most overt he will get in his slinging of the upper class, which thus makes it his most neo-realist work.

At only ten minutes it is a short and sweet taste of the director's themes and visuals to come, a must-see for Italian art-house fans. With or without subtitles it matters not, for the power of Antonioni's images transcend all forms of written or spoken communication. His documentaries would always possess a beautiful tribute to the humble lands of his birth, and Sette Canne un Vestito is arguably his most beautiful.

If love really does mean never having to say your sorry, then the producers of Oliver's Story should consider themselves lucky, because otherwise they'd have a lot to apologize for. Banal, melancholic and tepidly shallow, Oliver's Story is of all things a complete antithesis to Hiller's infinitely superior Love Story. Where Love Story was a celebration of life in the midst of death, Oliver's Story is narratively lifeless, so wallowing in death that in retrospect makes the finale of the first film seem like Laugh-In. In Love Story, Arthur Hiller was able to capture the optimism, vitality and spirit of its youth subjects, providing its flower children audience with a moral center to believe in. Here was a couple, Jenny and Oliver, who overcame class, religious and parental boundaries to create a marriage based on love over money or politics or heritage. Love Story was the penultimate baby boomer picture, a movie for youth the world over to celebrate their liberal optimism and flower power innocence.

In Oliver's Story these characters have grown tired, and so has the first film's spirit. The motivated, liberated youth from the first film become the self-centered, pouty aristocrats that populate this sequel. The hippie sensibilities of the first have been replaced with yuppie complacency, as Oliver goes on a journey discovering that hey, plant ownership ain't so bad after all. The "love story" in this film is pointless, since both characters care too much about themselves to ever come close to capturing the shared bonding between Oliver and Jenny in the first film. Marcie fills her life with recreation, be it tennis, fancy dinners or overseas photography. Oliver starts off a lawyer with a social concern, but ends up accepting his position into land-owning bourgeois society all because, you guessed it, Jenny would want him to do so. Please.

The movie is called Oliver's Story, and if it is to be about Oliver's soul searching, it is the most passive and empty searching as I've ever seen. O'Neal, who can be great when he wants to be, is reduced to pouting while looking onto open landscapes. While the film covers a span of two years, the dreary setting remains a constant winter, and the trees are as dead as the emotion in this film. Some will call it smart for eschewing the standard romance plot, as Bergen's character becomes a write-off after an abrupt confrontation two-thirds in, but it is just arrogant writing. Writer Erich Segal (who also penned the first film), seems determined to breakaway from seemingly low brow romance conventions, but in so doing he has created a totally stale and empty film. What is a romance film without any romance? Even the brief sex scene between O'Neal and Bergen is so truncated and undeveloped that it amounts to all the eroticism of a loaf of bread. Stale.

The film veers from being a love story to being an empty film on just how oh-so-tough it is being bourgeois. The first film worked so well because Ali MacGraw brought a spunk to her lower class Jenny, who in turn was able to free Oliver from his upper class conceits. Without Jenny, Oliver is just another pouty aristocrat, and nobody wants to see a movie about the wealthy complaining about how hard off they are. Sorry, but tennis matches, overseas trips and countryside dinners do not strike me as a particularly sympathetic lifestyle, widower or not.

The whole film is an insult to the original, embracing money over love, individual self-pity over altruistic compassion, and pouting over pleasure. It's one big melancholic bore, where we spend ninety minutes waiting for Oliver to come to the conclusion he should have reached at Jenny's funeral, and that is the need to move on. What does he move to? The comfort of his father's wealth. For those two lovers in the first film, who needed only love to make it, such a conclusion is particularly disheartening. Those who wish to preserve their love for the first film and its characters are best to avoid this sellout Love $tory.

John Carpenter's `Ghosts of Mars' is a derivative B-movie, and in that respect it succeeds admirably. Essentially a remake of the largely superior `Assault on Precinct 13', `Mars' is a film that allows Carpenter to get one step closer to the genre he has always wanted to convey. The Hawksian Western has always been a favorite to JC, and the dreary red sand of Mars is probably the closest he will ever come to recreating the Western aesthetic.

The true stand-out in the film is not the western skylines, but instead Natasha Henstridge's assured and confident performance. Her character is smart, sassy and can hold her own in any situation. She embodies all the characteristics of the traditional Howard Hawks female; she's poised, rough and manlier then any of the males in the film. Between this performance and her star-making turn in `Species', Henstridge has established herself as one of the toughest and most threatening female actresses today. She really is able to exude this power over all of her scenes, she carries a charisma scant few actresses today can proclaim. Jamie Lee Curtis' and Adrienne Barbeau's days as Carpenter's prime female leads are long gone, but Hesntridge has definitely proven with this role that she can more than fill the void.

Although in no way is `Ghosts of Mars' a great film, but it is definitely a step in the right direction for John Carpenter. It is a return to the condensed and simplistic stories that Carpenter shaped his career upon in the late 70's and early 80's. `Assault on Precinct 13' is a much more intriguing and fulfilling film, but this does a good job in an inter-textual manner at playing with Carpenter's original film, which itself was a play upon `Rio Bravo'. Ice Cube is certainly no Napoleon Wilson, but the chemistry between him and Henstridge is grounds enough on which to see the film. Definitely not Carpenter's best, but a solid film in its own right. Watch it, then watch `Assault on Precinct 13' to see Carpenter in his prime.